Some facts on sustainable

Suzuki: Our Global Economy is not Sustainable
[Via Informed Comment]

I had the pleasure of hearing biologist David Suzuki lecture at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday night during my recent short trip to Australia. He drew on his recent slight but meaty book, The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future. I downloaded it and read it on my iPhone via Kindle app on the plane Monday.

The quote that alarmed me most of all was this one:

“A report by the World Wide Fund-UK examined the length of time it takes for nature to replenish renewable resources (trees, fish, soil, etc.) that all humans remove in a year. So long as those resources are restocked in a year or less, that situation should be sustainable indefinitely. The report concluded that it takes 1.3 years to replace what humans exploit in a year, and that deficit has been going on since the 1980s. In other words, rather than living on the biological interest, we are drawing down on our basic natural capital.” – David Suzuki, The Legacy

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David Suzuki has been an important voice on this issue. Sustainable Path Foundation sponsored a seminar in 2007 by John Robinson, an advisory board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, that examined Sustainability in Practice and how we might get there. But he showed how far we need to go.

Taking 1.3 out while replacing with 1 means that eventually our sustainability account will be zero. The only thing to wonder about is how many years that will be. In some sectors, like fish, it could be as little as 30 years.

One way to create sustainable communities.

Building Stronger, Sustainable Communities Through Strategic Coordination
[Via White House.gov Blog Feed: WhiteHouse.gov Blog]

This morning at the National Press Club, I joined HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood, and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson to discuss the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The Partnership is an initiative that brings together the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Transportation to ensure that the agencies’ policies, programs, and funding consider affordable housing, transportation, and environmental protection together. Founded on the idea that how and where we build our communities affects our economy, our environment, and our everyday lives, the Partnership is supporting communities that want to give Americans more housing choices, make transportation systems more efficient and reliable, and support vibrant neighborhoods that attract businesses. This is good for our communities and good for our economy.

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Sustainable communities need several things and the Partnership works towards some of those. The Partnership provides some vision of just what Sustainable Communities look like:

Sustainable communities are places that balance their economic and natural assets so that the diverse needs of local residents can be met now and in the future.

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Sustainable communities allow people to live closer to jobs and save money on personal transportation, usually the second largest household expense and sometimes the largest for low-income Americans. Neighborhoods that make it easy to walk or bike to work, school, stores, parks, and other destinations help people stay healthy by incorporating regular exercise into their daily routines. Sustainable communities also reduce air and water pollution and protect treasured land- scapes and prime agricultural land.

Seattle is seeing the results of this right here. $30 million went from the Partnership’s Transportation INvestment Generating Economic Recovery Grants (TIGER) to work on the Mercer Mess. Here is the description:

The project involves the reconstruction and realignment of the main roadway through the growing biotechnology hub in South Lake Union, connecting a number of urban centers to I-5 in Seattle. The project will build multi-modal improvements along Mercer and Valley Streets, including widening Mercer to create a two-way boulevard, reconstructing Valley Street as a local access street, providing new and wider sidewalks, improving connections to transit and adding bicycle lanes.

And the proposed benefits:

The project area is in extremely poor condition and in need of rehabilitation. The roadwork will reengineer a key bottleneck and will also upgrade the water, sewer and electrical infrastructure that serves the area. The project is fully integrated with Seattle’s transit, bicycle and pedestrian plans, and it re-routes traffic flow and opens space for alternative transportation options and mixed-use development. The design criteria include innovative options for stormwater runoff, lighting and other project components. The South Lake Union development area is a pilot for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND).

We also just got a TIGERII grant for $34 million for the South Park Bridge replacement. And almost $5 million to the Puget Sound Regional Council to support metropolitan and multi-jurisdictional planning efforts that incorporate housing, land use, economic development, transportation and infrastructure.

In addition, the DOT has now created a new bicycle/pedestrian policy that, for the first time, puts non-motorized transportation on an equal footing with motorized. And now the FTA will extend eligibility for federal transit funds to bicycle and pedestrian improvements.

Quite a bit going on. The next year could be even more exciting.

Owww! Rage HD on my iPad makes me sore

Rage HD on my iPad is awesome. Fantastic graphics. Lots off action. Frustration when I can’t quite get over to the health bonus.

And the stress level is high enough that I am actually sore after a time. Luckily there is a pause button so I can stop and stretch a bit.

One of the nest games on rails I have ever played.

I will have to figure out if I want to use the tilt approach to aim or use the touch screen. I think the tilt may be faster but it take sometime to get used to the action.

This will take me a long time to get through. Great fun for $1.99. Did I say the graphics were awesome? That may not be high enough praise for what I see on a mobile device. I’m not sure any other handheld device comes close.

Sounds like Android Game development might be much slower than iOS

Android Game Development Sounds Like Fun
[Via Daring Fireball]

The Angry Birds team, on Android compatibility problems:

We are aware that a number of our fans have had trouble running the game on their devices. For example, some older and lower performance Android devices are experiencing severe performance issues.

We are preparing a new solution for the next update, but for the time being, the Android devices listed below are not officially supported by Angry Birds:

And they list about 20 Android models, including some brand-new ones like the T-Mobile G2. Don’t miss the comment thread on this one.

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Let’s see. Develop for the iPhone and the game can be bought and played on everything from an iPhone to an iPod Touch to an iPad and soon to a laptop or desktop computer. A small amount of development and you have an optimized version for each.

On android, you develop for the phone and then have to check it out on all the devices to see which ones it will work on. And then will it work on any tablet? 20 or more models that will not play a game.

Android users will now have to check the specs for any new game to see if their possibly new phone will work. Fragmentation of the market will make it much less likely that new, wonder games will be seen on the Android system first.

And given that the expectation at the Android app store is that things will be free, the developers are less likely to recoup as much money as with iOS.

[UPDATED] iOS is the greatest gaming system ever

Gaming titles for iOS DWARF gaming titles for all other consoles combined going back 25 years
[Via Edible Apple]

It took Nintendo and Sony a while to wake up and realize just how much gaming on the iOS was affecting their bottom line and changing the way folks play and view video games. The iTunes App Store together with the millions of iOS devices out on the market is a 1-2 punch that no competitor can match, and as a result, Apple’s share of US gaming revenue jumped nearly 500% from 2008 to 2009 while Sony and Nintendo both saw their percentage of gaming revenue shrink.

While Nintendo still reigns supreme in video game land, it recently posted its first quarterly loss in two years amidst plummeting Nintendo DS sales. Looking forward, Nintendo has high hopes that its upcoming Nintendo 3DS will keep folks from migrating over to the iOS platform, but as people become more comfortable with casual gaming, Nintendo is going to have a tougher time marketing a device that exclusively plays video games without offering other multimedia experiences.

Compounding matters, the selection of iOS games is completely astounding, even more so when measured against the number of games available for all other consoles combined. The graph below, courtesy of Richard Gaywood of TUAW, charts the total number of iOS gaming titles versus the cumalative total of gaming titles for every popular video game system dating all the way back to the original NES.

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[UPDATE: The original article at TUAW has some updated graphs that are interesting. Nice example of what open examination of data can produce. Someone else took the data and displayed it with a time dimension so you can understand just how fast this has all happened.]

In just a couple of years, three times more game titles have been created for the iOS devices than in 25 years for all the other gaming systems. This demonstrates how much easier it is to create a title for an iOS device. Making it easy to create a game and then being able to rapidly get it out to millions of people makes developers very happy. Distribution of titles for other gaming systems works against many small developers.

Sure, not all the games are great but if I had 3 times as many to choose from, I bet some good ones would rise to the top. Sturgeon’s Law would suggest that 90% of all games are crap. But if I have three times more to look at, I’m going to have a lot more good ones.

And these are much cheaper games to buy, as a group, than any other system.

Is this something Android will really be able to compete with? Hard to know since I enjoy playing the games more on my iPad than on my iPhone. Classic Doom is really cool in an iPad – tilting to strafe is a great innovation.

Another wonder game for iOS

Rage HD
[Via Daring Fireball]

Imagine going back in time just four years ago and showing this to someone, explaining that it’s running on your cell phone. Unbelievable.

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Only a couple of bucks. I’ll be downloading this.

I have to admit that I use my iPad in the bathroom. And instead of using it to read Flipboard or SkyGrid or other constructive things, I play games. A level of Classic Doom sure makes the time go by fast.

This is something that no Xbox can do. And other handheld games machines do not have the flexibility of iOS devices. And their games cost a lot more. Less than $2 is hard for them to compete with. And I bet the developers end up with a greater pot of money at the end of the day.

We will have to see how Rage does.

I see nothing. Nothing! TSA boss and Chertoff

TSA head: We know nothing of Chertoff’s pornoscanner conflict of interest. Also, who wants ice cream!
[Via Boing Boing]

[Video Link.] At 4:55 in this (excellent) interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, TSA administrator John Pistole claims to have no knowledge of former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff‘s conflict of interest regarding the recommendation to adopt Rapiscan pornoscanning devices.

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Isn’t it unfortunate they are called Rapiscans? Make the first ‘a’ long and see why.

Imitating Sgt. Schultz is not a good way to answer an question.

Finally, one of the comments hits a key point with these machines:

I opt out not because I’m prudish (I’m French, we have no modesty) but because I am a software engineer. There is a lot of software to control these machines, and it’s mostly new code. Which means it has bugs. Many bugs.

Assuming the radiation level generated by the machines is safe (I have no expertise to judge one way or the other), that assumes normal operations. That’s a big assumption.

In “normal” software, when there is a non-fatal bug it results in something looking strange to the user, or some incorrect transaction going through, which eventually might get caught. In these machines, unless the bug completely disables the machine, how can you tell there is problem? Your hair is not going to catch fire because the radiation level is 100 stronger than normal.

Even if these machines are 100% safe in a research setting (which they are not) we have no way of knowing if the individual machine has been properly inspected and is working correctly. One little bug and you could get exposed to much higher levels of X-rays than expected.

A personal anecdote. In the biotech lab I used to work in, we used radioactive compounds all the time. To track contamination, we had multiple Geiger counters around the lab. One day, all the counters in the lab went off, then stopped. Then they went off again. Not too high but very noticeable.

So, I walked around the lab with one trying to localize where the radiation was coming from. It quickly became apparent that it was coming from outside, up the street. Something about 100 yards away was sending out enough radioactivity for it to be detectable inside our building.

Turns out, it was a contractor who was checking pipe welds up the street. They were using an X-ray machine, that was supposedly emitting acceptable amounts of radiation. But we could detect the ionizing radiation 100 yards away, through two sets of brick walls. Think how high it might have been for anyone closer.

It really opened my eyes to the fact that an improperly calibrated machine could cause some real problems. Real world experiences with ionizing radiation do not necessarily match what is seen in a controlled setting.

Google TV may not be the way to go

Reviewers find Google’s answer to Apple TV chaotic, complicated
[Via AppleInsider]

The New York Times review of Google TV takes issue with its complexity, calling it a step in “the wrong direction,” while The Wall Street Journal says it “missed the mark.”

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Techies will like Google TV but the average household may not. TV is much more a passive experience, so actively checking websites in not very useful. Also, TV is usually watched by several people while Google TV can really only be experienced by the person with the controller. Finally, one more large controller for the TV is not what a lot of people want. Especially ones that are not very well designed.

Apple TV, on the other hand, it designed to do one thing really well – deliver video content over the Internet. Not for web searches, not for twitter accounts. For watching video.